If you don’t follow Amanda Rico on LinkedIn you should. She is always spot on and clearly is talking to a lot of employees. Her recent post on high CL employees in Midland (this means you former Pioneer employees) being dead men walking is a great example.
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@br yeah people win the lottery too. Don’t get peoples hope up. It is very very rare to become a hipo if you miss the two year in picking time.
@bf Yes and no. I know some people were not HiPos but were in the right place at the right time and made really good things happen for the corp and suddenly they were on the fast track even if they were not before the lucky break. Honestly that case is kind of rare-only twice in my 31 years did I see that happen. Mostly the ones identified early either made it ( about 20%) or flatten out or left the company.
If you're at ExxonMobil and nobody has ever told you whether you're on the HIPO track, there's a good chance that silence is your answer.
HIPO stands for High Potential, XOM's internal designation that signals leadership has identified you for accelerated advancement.
And it gets assigned a lot earlier in your career than expected.
Here's how it typically works:
Your trajectory gets assessed early. Sometimes as early as your first or second rotation.
Leadership above your direct manager is forming an opinion about your terminal Classification Level, CL being XOM's internal ranking system, before you've had enough time to fully demonstrate what you're capable of.
If you're tagged HIPO, doors open.
You get the high-visibility rotations, the cross-functional exposure, the senior sponsors who show up for you in calibration rooms you're not invited to yet.
If you're not tagged, the system isn't necessarily working against you. But it's also not actively working for you the way it is for the people who are.
Here's what I keep seeing from XOM professionals who come to me after hitting a wall they didn't see coming:
They assumed strong performance reviews meant they were on track.
They didn't realize the HIPO conversation had already happened above their level and nobody told them the outcome.
A few things worth knowing if you're early to mid career at XOM right now:
➤ Ask your manager directly whether you're being developed for a HIPO track. Most won't volunteer that information unprompted, but asking the question directly changes the conversation and tells you a lot about where you actually stand based on how they answer it.
➤ Pay attention to the rotations you're being offered versus the ones your peers are getting. High visibility cross-functional and international assignments don't get handed to everyone. If your rotations have stayed within the same asset or function for two or three cycles, that's worth paying attention to.
➤ Your first two years at XOM matter more to your long-term trajectory than most people understand going in. The impressions formed early are hard to change later, which is why the engineers who move fastest tend to be aggressive about visibility and sponsorship from day one, not after they've been in the system for five years wondering why things slowed down.
Have you seen the HIPO designation play out the way I've described inside XOM?
It's sad that the only kind of transparency we can get is through this website or social media influencer type posts
Oh she needs more followers. She is just a business woman ...I think she needs to do more research instead of copy posting from this websites. Her posts are garbage
She says nothing more than all we know,totally useless...no deep research or anything just getting info from these public sites.
Lets keep it real. All she does is drum up business.....